


our constant conundrum

by punkrockbadger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:20:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2220438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lily reaches across the couch and their fingers brush, but only just.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our constant conundrum

James, much like the first Lily, reduces other people to their essential components and learns each one by heart until he can do no wrong, turns personality and jokes into lines upon lines of letters and notes. He breaks people down out of habit and necessity, just as he does with his books, and lines the little pieces up neatly, attacking them one by one until he’s earned eternal loyalty.

Lily, much like the first James, paints them with as many colors as she can, keeping track of the ones that stick, and turns the people around her into veritable rainbows in an effort to make her surroundings as bright as she feels. She believes things as they are given to her and fights like there’s no tomorrow, teeth bared and nails ready to tear through any obstacles.

Lily is simple at first glance, but hides an overgrown, monstrous maze of feelings and confusion under a thin veneer of confidence, and James is the opposite, an imposing pile of forbidding metal parts that are, when observed closer, printed with neat, easily understandable instructions. Lily rises, high, mighty and indomitable, like a skyscraper and James stays close to the ground, digging his toes securely into the soil even as his sister makes friends with the clouds.

“Disliking anyone is just a matter of realizing you’re a lot more like them than you’d like to be.” James says astutely, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before turning another page in his book. Every six pages, he wipes his mouth once before turning the seventh, and for every fourteenth page turn, he flexes his toes once.

James is regimented in his habits, easily predicted and planned for, and Lily is an explosion of color, a ticking time bomb with no clock display, and you can never quite anticipate her next move. She is always just a little out of reach, just a little outside the realm of prediction, not enough to truly astound but enough to confound. “Suppose that’s why Dad, Uncle Ron and Cory’s dad don’t get along. They’re all ridiculously obstinate tossers at heart.”

Lily giggles while nodding, eyes alight as she swings her legs back and forth. She and James are sitting at opposite ends of the threadbare, ratty brown couch that their father had brought from his very first apartment, a small flat in the middle of London that he’d shared with their aunt and uncle. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum, as always, and it surprises no one. James and Lily never have made a habit of doing much together. “Guess it’s just a matter of perspective.”

There are just too many years between them to find much common ground, James muses, and counts them off in his mind. One, two, three, four, five, he thinks as his lips silently form the words, visualizing a set of fingers folding one by one. He was already losing teeth by the time she came into the world, crying and wriggling as if she had something to prove, and they had never quite found the time for each other the way they each had with Remus. He sees her fingers in the window of his mind, stubby, pale and short, with impossibly small fingernails, so unlike his own. He pauses for a second, once he reaches the end of a chapter, and catalogs the details of his hands. They are rough with calluses, just as hers are, from years of flying on Hogwarts’ persnickety old brooms, but the similarities end there.

James tans rather than burning in the summer, his skin easily darkening to nearly the same shade of dark brown as his wand rather than burning bright pink and peeling like Lily and Remus'. The freckles that paint their way across his sibling’s faces and arms like tiny constellations are missing on him, marking him out as an oddity from the start, when the three of them stand together, as if nothing else does. He has pianist’s hands, as Grandma Andie calls them, and he taught himself to play the summer he turned ten on the ancient, dust covered piano in Grandpa Sirius’ old room at Grimmauld Place. His inheritance, he calls it, running a hand along the smooth wooden casing, when no one is looking.

The first joint of Lily’s middle finger on her right hand bends to the left and forward, having been caught in a cabinet when she was three years old. James vaguely remembers her being entirely stoic about the situation, frowning obstinately as a couple errant tears squeezed out past her tightly shut eyelids despite her best efforts. In fact, he notes, Dad had cried more than she had. But Dad is a bit of an emotional mess, always has been, according to Mum, so his responses can’t exactly be counted as normal.

Lily enthusiastically chirps to the songbirds outside the window during breakfast while James notes down their characteristics, pulling the heavy book with all the types of birds in them down from the highest library shelf to put a solid name to it as soon as he has collected enough information. Lily smiles exuberantly at everyone she meets, has lifelong friends in less time than it takes to tie shoelaces, and James hesitantly hovers at the edges of gatherings, trying desperately to seek out someone who will excuse his lack of conversational skill. He is an excellent listener, but not a speaker by any means, and his sister is the exact opposite.

But not always, James remembers, as all siblings do have their similarities.

They eat their cookies the same way, the edges first before systematically making their way through the middles, and both feel hilariously out of place at large family gatherings. Lily is a social butterfly within any other group, but once the Weasley-Potter clan assembles, she is lost in the constant rush of action and adventure. They lose themselves in the near endless stream of stories, fading into the background together. They are both outsiders at home, something he will always find funny, but reasonable at the same time. They are named for people who lived and died for each other, so of course this would be shared between them. The out of place feeling that lurks in the depths of their chests makes sense, only because it is theirs.

James smiles softly as she slides the rectangular glasses that simply can’t stay in place back up his nose while he turns his page, toes twitching within the confines of his meticulously tied shoes as he reads through page one hundred and forty. She wiggles her bare toes to match, the sparkly red nail polish she’d painted on the night before shining as it caught the light.

“You’re right, Jim.” She says, looking anywhere but at him. Eye contact is rarely her thing, unless she has a point to prove. She prefers taking it all in at once. So does he, he muses, but they just go about it vastly different ways. He turns to his books and she soaks in the world like a sponge, moving through life like it owes her something. “Red really is my color.”

He nods, because he’s always known that. Lily is red, striking, brilliant and impossible to ignore. She is blinding at best and ominous at worst, hovering at the edge of your vision like an impending storm. She is all fiery promises and heartfelt declarations, something he will never stop admiring.

He thinks for a minute before settling on cadet blue for himself. An entirely uninteresting mixture of blue and gray, easily forgotten and overlooked in a box of far more interesting crayons, but one that provides useful camouflage. James has always appreciated his ability to blend into a background just as much as Lily embraces the fact that she will never quite disappear into a sea of faces the way he can.

“Cookie?” He asks, withdrawing a packet of her favorites from the knapsack he nearly always carries, and she nods as he tosses her one and she pulls the halves apart to lick the cream away before shoving the halves into her mouth in one go. He does the same thing, wondering whether she learned it for him or came by it herself, and she grabs another cookie before holding the halves over her eyes, sticking out her tongue as she contorts her face.

“All of the cookies. All of them. Mine.” She shoves one of the halves in her mouth and grins through a mouthful of crumbs.

James smiles back, albeit far more reserved, and they spend their afternoon watching the family rush about like headless chickens, sitting on opposite sides of the ragged old couch with a sleeping Remus lying across their laps. Because, at the end of the day, they relish being each other’s opposite.

“It’s fun, talking like this.” Lily reaches across the couch and their fingers brush, but only just.


End file.
